Religious Poems by Elizabeth Prentiss

Elizabeth Prentiss wrote 122 poems that “depict some of the deepest experiences of her Christian life . . . they are her tears of joy or of sorrow, her cries of anguish, and her songs of love and triumph.” The epigraph states: “The testimony of one soul is the experience of thousands.” As Harper’s Magazine (1874) wrote: “These poems . . . will give strength to many that feel the weariness, and faint under it, and that need just this cry of a labored trust as a means of conduct to the higher experience of joyous trust.”

Paperback 6X9, 164 pages, ISBN 9781941281604

Elizabeth Payson (1818–1878) was born in Portland, Maine. She had a feeble constitution and often battled sickness. Her writing talent became evident at an early age and she wrote for "The Youth's Companion" magazine. She had a natural gift for teaching and taught in a school in Richmond, Virginia. She had a religious life, but it wasn't until 1840 that the love of Christ became alive in her soul. She married Rev. George Lewis Prentiss in 1845, who was a pastor and became a professor of pastoral theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York. She published "Stepping Heavenward" in 1869 and it became very popular.